Lesson 1: Themes vs. Websites
What’s the difference between a theme and a website? In this course we will be building a theme in its purest sense: a skin for WordPress websites that plays nicely with WordPress’ native content types, and can be changed at a user’s will without compensating the integrity of their data.
Week One Live Session: Thursday, May 26
Watch the replay:
Lesson Plan
- The difference between themes and websites
- Installing themes vs. building websites
- A theme should be able to be changed
- Themes, themes, themes! Different types and how to customize them.
- Installing free themes from the repository and look at customization options
- Use Jetpack Custom CSS tool
- Create a child theme from a free theme
- Genesis and theme frameworks (and their dangers)
- Look at a premium theme (Climate25 with August and others) with a page builder and too many options - bad news bears!!
- Lara’s philosophy regarding theme development, and the proper way to develop custom themes
- Content focused
- For a specific use case, think: farmer's market, portfolio, restaurant
- A recap of our project and overview of the WordPress repository theme guidelines
- Listing requirements for your theme and planning for them
- Get started! Set up your development environment.
- Install WordPress within MAMP
- Install the Underscores starter theme
- Create a Git repository to track our changes